The US will only lose its pre-eminence if it loses the will to lead

Until a certain murder in Sarajevo in June 1914, Britons could afford to ignore crises in the Balkans. The year that is now ending might be the last when we could safely live in ignorance of lonely island chains in the East China Sea. Judging by the open anxiety of countries as diverse as Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, 2013 could be a year when China’s rise leads to actual military confrontation, probably centred on the hotly contested archipelagos that line the country’s eastern seaboard. Improbable as it might sound, the uninhabited Senkaku Islands – or the Diaoyus, as Beijing calls them – could yet become household names.

Desolate and worthless they might appear, but these specks of land happen to lie across key shipping lanes and possible oil deposits. Most vitally of all, they stand between an awakening giant and its nervous neighbours, who fear that America, their superpower protector, has yet to wrench itself off the path of decline. Little wonder that some of the world’s most powerful navies already circle the remote Senkakus and other similarly sensitive outcrops.

This raises what are likely to be the central themes of 2013: Xi Jinping, who will formally become China’s president in March, will have to decide whether to abandon his regime’s traditional caution and exert his country’s new strength. Meanwhile, Barack Obama and his opponents will discover whether they have the collective resolve to secure America’s pre-eminence.

The latter question will be partially answered on day one of 2013. Unless harmony breaks out in Washington in the next 48 hours, America will fall off its “fiscal cliff” on New Year’s Day and, by law, adopt a raft of policies that would, if sustained, hurl it straight back into recession. While the spectacle of a superpower preparing publicly to shoot itself in the foot may be unprecedented, the good news is that Congress and the White House are unlikely to stay on the road to self-destruction for long. There may be no deal in time to avoid the cliff-edge on Tuesday, but the possible reaction of the financial markets, not to mention the American public, should be enough to force agreement soon thereafter.

Then President Obama and the Republicans will have to confront the reality that America’s national debt of $16.3 trillion (£10.2 trillion) – 103 per cent of gross domestic product – poses the single greatest threat to US national power. That is made doubly true by China’s ironic status as America’s biggest creditor, a fact that led Hillary Clinton, the outgoing secretary of state, to rue the impossibility of getting “tough with your banker”.

Anyone who values American leadership will hope that Mr Obama and the Republicans in Congress can agree the necessary combination of tax increases and spending cuts. Besides, 2013 will not be the year when the US loses its innovative edge. If another Apple, Microsoft or Google comes into being, it remains a safe bet that this will happen in America. So there is nothing inevitable about the superpower’s loss of pre-eminence: in the final analysis, it will happen only if Washington loses the will to lead.

These titanic decisions make the European Union’s protracted agony seem prosaic. But Europe remains one of the world’s three great hubs of political and economic power alongside the US and China. If the answer to the eurozone crisis is political and fiscal union between the currency’s members – and that is the inescapable logic – then the EU is doomed to years of navel-gazing internal reform. Britain will not be a part of this inner core and we must avoid being distracted by the internecine wrangling.

Instead, the focus of our diplomacy must remain on containing the most pressing threats. As ever, they will probably emerge from the Middle East and North Africa: in Mali, al-Qaeda still controls an area three times bigger than Britain and a plan to break its grip is steadily unravelling. Syria’s bloodshed has become a sectarian civil war with the awful consequence that President Bashar al-Assad’s richly deserved downfall will not, of itself, restore peace.

Meanwhile, the most poisonous and intractable conflict of all is nearing the point where resolution will become effectively impossible. By relentlessly expanding Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, Israel is rendering the “two-state solution” unachievable. Mr Obama should make the quest for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement a key priority of his second term; after all, the option may not be open to his successors. Behind everything will be the unresolved crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions: again, 2013 will offer what is probably the last chance for a settlement.

As the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War approaches, the parallels between the world of 1914 and of 2013 are striking. Then, Wilhelmine Germany was the rising power and Britain the flagging supremo. A failure to manage and contain Germany’s ascent led ultimately to tragedy. Mr Xi is not the Kaiser and there is no reason why the Senkakus should become the Sarajevo of our era. But the world would be less dangerous if America used this year to guarantee its leadership.